In unfairness to Morrissey’s point, at least during the era of immigration that we associate with the Statue of Liberty, unless you were Asian, it was very easy to immigrate here legally–pretty much only anarchists, criminals, and people with mental or contagious illness didn’t get in. If I remember correctly from my last trip to Ellis Island, 93% of the people who went there got in.
In fairness to his point, the wave of immigration that came during that time spooked the people who were already here to such a degree that they cut it off. While the tactics they used really were racist, or at least ethnicist (the exclusion of Asians, and the setting of quotas that favored Northern Europeans over Southern and Eastern Europeans), in fairness to them, one wonders what would have happened if the flow had continued unchecked (although you could argue that the Depression would have dried it up anyway.) Interestingly enough, they didn’t put restrictions on Mexicans; that only came with the modern quotas.
It is also true that being American is a matter of “faith”, or at least beliefs, as opposed to ethnicity. The problem is that what Obama and his supporters have “faith” is not the same as what many of the rest of us believe in. It’s also true that in the old days, this country had a much greater commitment to pushing people to assimilate then it does now–I’d feel a lot better about the current wave of immigration if that was still the case, not to mention if we still had the lack of welfare statism that we did then. I’d also feel a lot better if so much of the current wave wasn’t coming from basically the same culture, but was more evenly divided up among Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans.
